English Language FAQ

Not according to one of the best contemporary essayists, Jacob Eptsein: A fter thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.” Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader.  Read the full article here

English Language FAQ: The most common spelling errors in English? : "Why are some words so hard to spell? My post for the OUP Global Blog considers recent research into the twenty most misspelt words in Engl..." Practical Spelling (Basics Made Easy) Franklin Electronic Publishers SA-309 Spelling Ace Thesaurus with Merriam-Webster Puzzle solver

English Language FAQ: The most common spelling errors in English? : "Why are some words so hard to spell? My post for the OUP Global Blog considers recent research into the twenty most misspelt words in Engl..."

Why are some words so hard to spell?  My post for the OUP Global Blog  considers recent research into the twenty most misspelt words in English. The Birds and Bees of Words: A Guide to the Most Common Errors in Usage, Spelling, and Grammar Quick Solutions to Common Errors in English: An A-z Guide to Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (How to Books)

A widely used neolgism with an imprecise definition. Crowd sourcing is the equivalent of 'asking the audience' in a radio show. It is a very popular concept in marketing as this example from a furniture design company illustrates: "We figured that consumers would be the best judges for us," he says. Made.com gives designers the opportunity to submit ideas and then asks customers to vote on them. Only the top vote getters are offered for sale. The term crowdsourcing is only a few years old, but the idea's been around for a decade. That's when online T-shirt seller Threadless, a pioneer crowdsourcing website based in Chicago, launched. Last year, according to Forbes , Threadless had sales of $30 million. Since then, companies as diverse as P&G, GE and Anheuser-Busch have used crowdsourcing to percolate product and advertising ideas.  Full Time article here  and a remarkable recent example in education here :

The groove on vinyl records, particularly the old 78s rpm jazz records of the 20s and 30s. The depth and width of the groove indicated the speed and beat - something later picked up by early rappers like Grandmaster Flash.  Jazz musicians used 'groove' as a term of appreciation and this later became part of pop music culture - the Beatles were famously fond of the adjective groovy. Much later 'groovy' became one of the catch-phrases Austen Powers, a sign that the word had come to symobolise 1960s fantasies of  personal liberation and free love.